“I am afraid that Mr. Hall may send you both home.”
That, indeed, was our great fear.
I have tried to make it dear that there were some good men in Griggsby; and I must not fail to tell of one of them, the Rev. Appleton Hall, head of the academy, a plain, simple, modest citizen. What a splendid figure of a man he was—big, strong-armed, hard-handed, with black eyes and a beautiful, great head crowned with a wavy mass of blonde hair. That and its heavy, curling beard were as yellow as fine gold. What a tower of rugged strength and fatherly kindness! We loved the touch of his hand and the sound of his voice—when we did not fear them. As he stood with his feet in the soil of his garden and his collar loose at his throat he reminded me of that man of old of whom it was written: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”
He fought against the powers of darkness for the sake of the boys. He was handicapped; he could not denounce the great men of the village by name as pestilential enemies of decency and order. Perhaps that should have been done by the churches. Old “App” Hall, as some called him, warned and watched us; but, with his rugged figure, his old-fashioned clothes, and his farmer dialect, he had not the appeal—the darling appeal of Websterians like Griggs and Colonel Buckstone. However, there was something fatherly about him that made it easy to confess both our truancy and our money loss. Of course, he forgave us, but with stern advice, which did not get under our jackets, as had that of Dan'l Webster Smead. He said we were fools; but we knew that, and would have admitted more.
I began to attend to business as a student, but Henry went on with his skylarking. Dan'l Webster Smead went to work buying produce for the Boston market, and spent every evening at home. He got his wife a hired girl, and the poor woman soon had a happier look in her face. The children wore new clothes, and a touch of the buoyant spirit of the racer Montravers, now cast out of his life, soon entered the home of Smead.
Ralph Buckstone and I had become the special favorites of Appleton Hall. Florence had managed to keep me out of mischief for some time. Naturally, my love for her had led to the love of decency and honor, which meant that I must do the work set before me and keep on fairly good terms with myself. It was Florence, I am sure, who had had a like effect upon Ralph. We took no part, thereafter, in the ranker deviltry of the boys and did fairly good work in school.
One evening Ralph came to my room and told me that he had had a quarrel with his father. It seemed that a clever remark of Florence about the last spree of the Colonel had reached his ears. The Colonel, boiling with indignation, had made some slighting reference to her and all other women in the presence of his son. High words and worse had followed, in the course of which the sacred, gold-headed cane of the Colonel, presented to him by the Republican electors of the town, had been splintered in a violent gesture. The cane had been used, not for assault, but for emphasis. Ralph had been blamed by the Colonel for the loss of his temper and the loss of his cane. The great man might have forgiven the former, but the latter went beyond his power of endurance. So he turned the boy out of doors, and Ralph came directly to my room, where his father found and forgave him with great dignity in the morning, and bade him return to his home.
There was some drunken brawling in the streets by night, and now and then a memorable battle, followed by prosecution and repairs. About then Appleton Hall gave a lecture on the morals of Griggsby, which was the talk of the school and the village for a month or more. In it were the words about Daniel Webster and the first Bunker Hill oration which I quoted at the beginning of this little history. People began to wake up.
Our preachers came back from Samaria and Egypt, “from Africa's sunny fountains and India's coral strands,” and began to think about Griggsby. At last they seemed to recognize that foreign heathens were inferior to the home-made article; that they were not to be compared with the latter in finish and general efficiency. They turned their cannons of oratory and altered the range of their fire. A public meeting was held in the town hall, and the curses of the village were discussed and berated. A chapter of the Cadets of Temperance was organized, and Ralph and I joined. We carried torch lights in a small procession led by Samantha Simpson, and cheered and shouted and had a grand time; but we failed to overawe the enemy. Nothing resulted that could be discerned by the naked contemporary eye save the ridicule that was heaped upon us. If one wanted to create a laugh in a public speech he would playfully refer to the Cadets of Temperance. Good people were wont to say, “What's the use?”
The people are a patient ox. A big woolen mill polluted the stream that flowed through the village. It was our main water supply. The people permitted the pollution until the water was not fit to use. Then they went back to the wells and springs again. There was some futile talk about the shame of it. Letters of complaint were printed in The Little Corporal, our local paper. By and by a meeting was held and a committee appointed to see what could be done. They made sundry suggestions, most of which were ridiculed, and the committee succeeded only in getting themselves disliked.